Larson is every bit a realist in the sense that he works with flesh-and-blood kids in a commonplace classroom doing the heavy lifting and ordinary work. He writes, as it were, with one foot in a world that could be but is not yet, and the other in the mud and the muck and the green grass of this earth.
—William Ayers, from the Foreword
In Making Conversation, Mark Larson reinvents his own teaching by raising difficult questions at the heart of the English classroom: Should we have a canon? If we do, who will decide what will be in it and how will they make that decision? How do we balance student choice with our responsibility to lead students to higher ground? How do we assess student progress in ways that both yield useful, reliable information and are fair to all students? How do we engage disengaged students without compromising standards? What are our standards? And most important: What is English class?
Larson revisits these and many other questions in full view of his colleagues, administrators, and students. He uses open letters to faculty and students, in which he explores doubts about his own work as a teacher, his successes and failures in the classroom, his questions about the educational system, and his ideas on how to handle some of the more perplexing dilemmas today's teachers face. A dialogue ensues in which colleagues and students reply with ideas of their own.
This book will lead preservice and inservice teachers, administrators, and education professors to reflect on their own systems, their own teaching methods, the ways they assess student work, and their hopes and expectations for their students. Making Conversation, Larson writes in the introduction, is "propelled by the belief that by unearthing . . . the questions that keep us perennially perplexed, we are making our way toward viable, grounded solutions."
